Creating the Helicarrier of Captain America: The Winter Soldier

How Industrial Light & Magic created the largest CG model in its history.

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The star of Captain America: The Winter Soldier is neither Captain America nor the Winter Solider. It's the next-gen Helicarrier, a technological marvel and ultimate superweapon that can stay in orbit to target and kill about a million victims at once. But is it a terrorist's worst nightmare, or American militarization out of control? That's the big dilemma facing Chris Evans's Cap and the vaunted S.H.I.E.L.D. organization in the newest Marvel film.

To create this technological terror, the plan at Industrial Light & Magic was to do a slight upgrade on the Helicarrier from The Avengers. But because of the scope of the movie—the entire plot of Winter Soldier revolves around the Helicarrier, known as "Project Insight"—ILM did a complete rebuild, as well as expanding from one to three massive airships. The CG models of Project Insight became the largest in ILM history.

The Helicarrier is about 25 percent larger than its predecessor: It measures 1400 feet long and 830 feet from wingtip to wingtip. The carrier is designed with more powerful Phalanx guns—14 scattered around the deck, with 70-foot barrels firing 2-foot shells. It's like a modern version of a broadside pirate ship, but with a Stark Repulsor engine. (In fact, it's hinted in Winter Soldier that Tony Stark got tired of being roughed up in The Avengers and offered his own tech to S.H.I.E.L.D.)

"It's got the big guns on the deck, the superweapon, and the underbelly surveillance hub, where the Cap and Winter Soldier fight takes place," ILM visual F/X supervisor Russell Earl says. "The brothers [directors Anthony and Joe Russo] wanted everything to be grounded in a reality, even if it was technology that we don't necessarily have. We did 90 percent modern and 10 percent World War II."

One of the design challenges was getting that nifty surveillance dome to sit in the carrier so it didn't appear like a big, pregnant belly below. ILM came up with an armored, translucent polymer dome that contains nearly 70 cameras inside the underbelly, giving the filmmakers access to lots of up-close shots.

"We were everywhere on the carriers: on the decks, flying along the side, up close on the guns, inside the surveillance hub, outside of the hub, close on the superweapons," Earl says. "We spent a year-plus just building out this carrier."

But with fully digital environments and so much destruction (at one point a Helicarrier crashes into a building in Washington, D.C.), ILM couldn't load all of the assets at one time. Instead, the artists broke it up by using just one or two carriers at a time. V-Ray for Katana came in handy for the first time as part of ILM's lighting arsenal, allowing better integration of high-complexity shots.

The end result: spectacular aerial battles that tear these fancy aircraft to shreds. "You spend all this time building these carriers and then you end up destroying them," Earl says.

Bill Desowitz runs Immersed in Movies and is author of James Bond Unmasked, currently available in a Kindle version.